Body

Amyloid protein causes diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But amyloid also carries unique characteristics that may lead to the development of new composite materials for the nano processors and data storage of tomorrow, and even make objects invisible.

Physicists have developed a "planet-satellite model" to precisely connect and arrange nanoparticles in three-dimensional structures. Inspired by the photosystems of plants and algae, these artificial nanoassemblies might in the future serve to collect and convert energy.

Caribou in southern and eastern Canada may disappear from most of their current range in 60 years if climate change takes the toll on their habitat that scientists predict in a paper appearing online Dec. 15 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Scientists looked at reservoirs of genetic diversity in caribou and whether that diversity was linked to stable habitats. They found that caribou populations in the most climatically stable areas had the greatest genetic diversity and note that future climate forecasts bode ill for both caribou habitat and their genes.

Scientists from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered a key process during the invasion of the blood cell by the Malaria parasite, and more importantly, found a way to block this invasion.

With this new knowledge, NTU is looking to collaborate with the industry on a vaccine against Malaria which can be developed within the next five years if accelerated by vaccine development companies, says lead scientist Professor Peter Preiser.

Service-oriented businesses that want to succeed with minority customers should consider hiring frontline employees who represent those ethnic groups, particularly when the business caters to Hispanics or Asians, a recent UT Arlington study contends.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers working to advance imaging useful to medicine and security are capitalizing on the same phenomenon behind the lingering "ghost" image that appeared on old television screens.

A team of researchers from Purdue University and Macquarie University in Sydney has created a way to control the length of time light from a luminescent nanocrystal lingers, adding a new dimension of time to color and brightness in optical detection technology.

STANFORD, Calif. — Pregnant women, infants and young children should avoid raw or unpasteurized milk and milk products and only consume pasteurized products, according to a new policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The statement — whose lead author is Yvonne Maldonado, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine — will be published online Dec. 15 in Pediatrics.

Americans' perceptions of income inequality are largely over-inflated when compared with actual census data, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"With the genuine rise in wealth inequality over the past several decades, and the popular media's intensive coverage of this issue, we wondered how income inequality is perceived by the average American," says psychological scientist John Chambers of St. Louis University.

Long-lived deep-sea corals preserve evidence of a major shift in the open Pacific Ocean ecosystem since around 1850, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The findings, published December 15 in Nature, indicate that changes at the base of the marine food web observed in recent decades in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre may have begun more than 150 years ago at the end of the Little Ice Age.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have discovered a tube-shaped structure that forms temporarily in a certain type of virus to deliver its DNA during the infection process and then dissolves after its job is completed.

The researchers discovered the mechanism in the phiX174 virus, which attacks E. coli bacteria. The virus, called a bacteriophage because it infects bacteria, is in a class of viruses that do not contain an obvious tail section for the transfer of its DNA into host cells.

Reindeer, from Northern Europe or Asia, are often thought of as a domesticated animal, one that may pull Santa's sled. Caribou, similar in appearance but living in the wilderness of North America, are thought of as conducting an untamed and adventurous life. However, new research published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that there are more similarities about these two animals than previously thought and change in climate played a role in their evolution.

A new discovery by scientists could help combat the spread of sleeping sickness.

Insights into how the parasites that cause the disease are able to communicate with one another could help limit the spread of the infection.

The findings suggest that new drugs could be designed to disrupt the flow of messages sent between these infectious microorganisms.

PITTSBURGH, Dec. 15, 2013 – The lung lesions in an individual infected with tuberculosis (TB) are surprisingly variable and independent of each other, despite whether the patient has clinically active or latent disease, according to a new animal study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The findings, published online today in Nature Medicine, could point the way to new vaccines to prevent the hard-to-treat infection.

Cancer cells that spontaneously fuse with macrophages, the immune system's healthy scavenger cells, play a key role in the metastasis, or spread of the cancer to other areas of the body, according to research to be presented Sunday, Dec. 15, at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting in New Orleans.

Nicotine, the major addictive substance in cigarette smoke, contributes to smokers' higher risk of developing atherosclerosis, the primary cause of heart attacks, according to research to be presented Sunday, Dec. 15, at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

These findings suggest that e-cigarettes, the battery-powered devices that deliver nicotine in steam without the carcinogenic agents of tobacco smoke, may not significantly reduce smokers' risk for heart disease, said Chi-Ming Hai, Ph.D., of Brown University.